Critics reviews

The year's most unclassifiable film, Eduardo Williams's strikingly ambitious first feature unearths a dystopian essence from the landscape of our postmodern social ecology.

It's a film that casts a critical eye on our moment—characters across scenarios are in constant search of connectivity or places to plug in their devices—that's too artfully done to devolve into a broadside. It's the most laid-back movie of grand ambition to come along in some time.

How often do you see a film unlike anything else you have watched before? The debut feature from Argentinian director Eduardo Williams is so formally daring and intellectually restless that it could work as well as an art installation as it does documentary cinema. Williams interacts with the film-making process with the same skittish, skimming approach that his millennial subjects bring to their relationship with information technology.

It's freewheeling to the point of monotony, yet the droning longueurs are all part of the film's subtle exploration of boredom, individuality and our abusive relationship with technology. The final section is also the toughest as Williams seems determined not to force a connection or emphasise a theme. Then when it comes to a climactic coda set in an electronics shop floor, the film evolves into a surreal comedy tableaux that's like Samuel Beckett playing Pong with Chris Marker.

At its best, Williams' film brings a revealing formal approach to characters and spaces. At its weakest, The Human Surge includes some redundant sequences that feel confined to an empty form of aestheticism.

In one of the film's most memorable scenes, a group of young men languorously perform sexual acts upon one another in front of a webcam. This is the most potent visualisation of physically docile bodies in the entire programme, but simultaneously it's a digital reconfiguration aimed at casting off the shackles of prescribed control.

It is the film's musicality that leads the way, composed of expressive repetitions of thematic motifs, and the deconstruction of how we've grown accustomed to dealing with them. Through the creative manipulations of these motifs, Williams unlocks the viewer to different possibilities, different presents and, hopefully, different futures.

An exciting debut feature, THE HUMAN SURGE is full of bold formal decisions that reflect an avid curiosity about making movies... These approaches elicit some compelling observations about the day-to-day impact of globalization, but Williams is more interested in using cinema to forge connections between different people and places. The film is more poem than prose, which in documentary filmmaking is never a bad thing.

One major challenge for this work that straddles different locations and casts involves the creation of connections between three successive narratives. Williams largely succeeds even if there is a certain didacticism in his geographic movement and its summary in the film's epilogue, when we enter a manufacturing plant where workers are constructing LCD screens.

With minimal preparation, cross-language collaboration with non-actors, and spontaneous incorporation, Williams operates semi-consciously—call it automatic filmmaking. Rhythm and environment supersede conventional narrative, with dialogue an additional layer of texture rather than propellant. The resulting film imbues a concrete world with dream logic as it flows through three sections.

With The Human Surge, a debut feature that defies categorization and other expectations besides, the Argentinean director Eduardo Williams has done nothing less than attempt to rewire narrative cinema for the information age. It's a testament to his talent that he so often succeeds.

The mood of The Human Surge is mostly one of repose, but repose haunted by the prospect of work, the threat of which is felt throughout the film—shirking it, submitting to it, dreading waking up to it, getting fired, walking off of the job. (And yes, those are worker ants.) It makes for an exhilarating, boldly paradoxical experience—a headlong dive into the rich, knotty, sticky undergrowth amid a proliferation of tidy, well-lit paths.